From $0 to $5K MRR: How Two Engineers Built UseDouble and Pivoted to Double.bot

Background and First MVP

In late 2022, engineers Gonzalo Espinoza Graham and Wesley Yue were running a grocery delivery service in Toronto. They spent hours each night manually placing restock orders with multiple vendors. Frustrated by repetitive tasks and knowing that scriptable AI models were emerging, they built a simple spreadsheet that could send prompts to GPT-3 davinci-003 and organize results into cells. That hack quickly showed promise.

Building UseDouble.com

With the spreadsheet as an early MVP, they wrapped it into a web tool called UseDouble.com. They let people sign up to a waitlist and posted demos on Twitter and Hacker News. The viral tweet plus a Hacker News comment drove over 1,000 signups before they wrote a line of ad copy. Then a top-5 finish on Product Hunt sent free traffic bulging through their landing page.

Finding a Niche and Monetization

While users loved feeding data into GPT-3 to enrich lead lists, costs soared from $7 to $500 per month by February 2023. Conversations with customers revealed a single group that valued the tool most: B2B sales teams. The founders added email finder, data enrichment from LinkedIn and Crunchbase, and CRM integrations. They tested pricing tiers all the way up to $500/month. Surprisingly, the higher price attracted more serious customers and got them to $5K MRR in just six months.

Challenges and a Failed Hypothesis

As revenue grew, UseDouble users often enriched a list and then vanished for months. The founders experimented with running personalized outbound campaigns, using their own API to craft 10,000 AI-powered emails per week. Results? Conversion rates were no better than basic templates. Sales reps preferred proven messages, showing that AI-personalization alone wasn’t enough to change workflows.

Pivoting to Double.bot

Around this time they were also testing GitHub Copilot and noticed key feature requests were ignored upstream. They realized their strengths lay in building developer tools. Leveraging their own coding experience, Gonzalo and Wesley built Double.bot, an AI assistant that suggests code, fixes bugs, and answers questions from public docs. When they launched in June 2024, they hit 10,000 users within two weeks, a rapid response compared to the six-month timeline with UseDouble.

Key Lessons and Next Steps

• High-value niches are worth charging premium prices for.
• Rapid feedback from real users beats chasing untested ideas.
• Solve problems you know first-hand; it accelerates product-market fit.
• Slow marketing channels like SEO and content can compound over time.
• Be ready to pivot when signals point to a better opportunity.

Today Double.bot aims to match or exceed the $5K MRR milestone set by their first product. By focusing on their core competency, developer experience, they’ve set a fast pace for growth in a crowded AI coding space.